Triple Bottom Line

This paper describes a collaborative approach initiated by the Monfort Institute at the University of Northern Colorado to engage high-level practitioners of performance excellence and academic researchers to: (a) identify the external and internal dilemmas facing practitioners in high performing organizations; (b) develop a purposeful research agenda that addresses both the needs and interests of practitioners and researchers; and (c) develop a concept of operations to address the research agenda. High performing organizations face many external pressures from customers, investors, suppliers and partners, and the public. In addition, they face internal challenges including leadership and workforce turnover, cultural challenges, limited understanding of the continuous refinement and integration of management systems at the upper levels of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) scoring scale.  This initiative resulted in a viable research agenda of value to practitioners and researchers to better understand organizational performance excellence and improvement approaches and expand research efforts in quality management.  Several projects are currently in process through the Monfort Institute, and plans for continued collaboration have been developed.

This case study outlines how Wayne Fergusson’s investment consortium, representing high profile social impact organisations and individuals, has invested $22.45 million in a farm within the Afram Plains District of Ghana. Fergusson’s organisation has high hopes of reducing hunger, creating jobs, and helping development in the district catch up with the rest of the country. Just as the project was gaining significant media coverage and the interest from social investors across the world, new information regarding the use of questionable pesticides and possible child labour issues has been uncovered by a potential investor named Angela Wallingford. This case study which is a real case with the names of the actors changed for privacy and confidential reasons, was designed to help students think through the importance of the dynamics of social change, the triple bottom-line, and ethical decision-making, to grasp more profoundly the challenges facing venture philanthropists, impact investors and the type of leadership required to meet these challenges. This case is intended for use in upper level undergraduate, MBA/MS organisational Leadership (OL) and non-profit management courses. It could, also be used in training to focus on mission delivery in the non-profit sector, leadership and complex decision-making.

"With regard to the current international buzz on sustainability, there is a growing awareness among decision makers that their sustainable success is profoundly dependent on creating a harmony between a triple bottom line (an integration of economic, social and environmental responsibilities) across all organisational decisions from strategies to operations. As a consequence, operations managers are increasingly challenged to integrate and transmit sustainable strategic concepts to the organisational operations through sustainable action plans.
If “sustainability” is to become somehow a reality emerging from strategic concepts, it is important that operations management as a “Conveyor Belt” embraces the sustainable strategies and conveys them through action plans towards organisational results. Hence, a “sustainability roadmap” needs to be developed to indicate the channel strategic concepts have to pass on to lead the organisation towards sustainable success.
A roadmap can be defined as a pathway of presumed future and anticipated changes, linked together into tangible organisational plans and considering the organisational objectives and competencies. Traditional strategic roadmaps are out of date since they are single-sided, as they consider only one of the triple bottom-line elements (economic responsibility). Hence, they cannot be relied upon to lead organisations towards their sustainable success. Therefore, operations managers are facing many challenges for translating sustainable strategy to operations, integrating their triple bottom-line and measuring progress towards organisational success. 
Informed by the literature review, this study aims to indicate how decision makers can bridge the gap between strategic concepts and organisational actions by applying the “sustainable balance scorecard”. This research explores how to formulate sustainability roadmaps leading from sustainable strategy to sustainable success, and how operations can contribute to realise this transition.  Finally, the study aims to provide an overview of the different barriers and challenges modern industries face along the ‘sustainability transmission path’ from strategy to operations management."

"Indicators-based projects are currently central to many local, city-wide, national and international sustainability initiatives. The quantitative basis of many such projects means that achieving sustainability through them is often undertaken as a technical task. The size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within many such projects means that they are often unwieldy and resist effective implementation. Arguably, the techno-scientific ‘edge’ inherent in them tends to blur the possibilities for bringing into question the structures of power and criteria by which values are translated into practice. It limits the way that a community may use indicators to support sustainable practices or to challenge unsustainable practices. The article discusses some of the methodological issues that arise when setting out to develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that incorporate some quantitative metrics. This alternative approach involves people in actively learning and negotiating over how best to put sustainability into practice. The aim of such a research method is to engage citizens in the job of achieving sustainability as a task of itself, undertaken on terms acceptable to them in the context of the communities in which they live.
Key words: sustainability, community, qualitative and quantitative research, mixed methods, indicators.
"

In a narrative built around our experience of art placed in the lobby of a corporate edifice, we argue that a city bureaucracy is actively participating in the legitimised abduction of community resources by urban developers: that however well-intentioned, subscription to the notion that social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities can be expected of, and accounted for, by corporate business, is naïve. Our intention is to signal the outcome—corporate control of our aesthetic environment—that our discussion foreshadows.